Literature Glossary

Don’t be an oxymoron. Know your literary terms.

Simile

Definition:

Similes make Shmoop smile like somethin' else.

That's a simile, albeit not a very good one. A simile is a figure of speech that makes use of the adverbs "like" or "as" to make a comparison or analogy. In that sense, it's a very specific kind of metaphor, but for the most part, we can think of it as its own separate beast.

Similes have been around forever. Greek poet guy Homer used them in his writing all the time, the longer the better. Check out our section on the Homeric simile (a.k.a. a heroic simile) in our learning guide on the Odyssey.